1. Field of the Invention
The present invention pertains to content selection mechanisms within digital content-laden material, and more particularly to embedding MPEG-7 content descriptions as META data within the header of a document containing markup language to increase specificity of content selection.
2. Description of the Background Art
The proliferation of digital material, such as over the Internet, has provided persons utilizing such content with nearly an unlimited amount of text and multimedia from which to choose. Attached, however, to the advantages of this content proliferation are the practical difficulties associated with searching, or otherwise selecting, digital content elements to best meet the content needs of the searcher. The large amount of digital material, such as various forms of multimedia content, that can be returned from a content search often require inordinate amounts of human interaction to select the most appropriate items in relation to the desired content. Large content repositories, such as those providing stock photographs over the Internet, have utilized diverse methods of cataloging their content to speed the selection process.
The Moving Pictures Expert Group, known as the MPEG working group of ISO/IEC, has proposed a standard referred to as MPEG-7 for describing content, with particular emphasis on multimedia content such as video, images, music, speech, audio, and so forth. It should be appreciated that MPEG-7 provides a standard for representing information about the content, and does not provide a mechanism for representing actual content, as were found in the previous standards, such as MPEG-1 and MPEG-2.
Included within the content descriptions within MPEG-7 are the use of descriptors that can be utilized to describe the various features of the multimedia content, and the use of description schemes which provide predefined structures of descriptors and their relationships. The standard provides for differing levels of granularity and user-group specificity within content descriptions. For example, the description of an image content element may describe the shape, size, and color, while a higher level of abstraction may for instance describe mood, genre, semantics and relationships which exist within associated content. Machine generated information, such as color histograms and audio characterization data may also be included within the MPEG-7 descriptions. Each description may also contain content type descriptions including: form, such as data size and coding scheme; classification, such as parental ratings and usage area; access conditions, such as copyright information, price, and contact information; context, such as from where the content was collected or created; links to other relevant content, and so forth. It will be appreciated that various levels of content information may be contained by the MPEG-7 standard for indexing or cataloging multimedia content. However, users or agents searching for select content do not have a convenient method for utilizing MPEG-7 content descriptions to facilitate their searches.
Therefore, a need exists for a method and system of incorporating MPEG-7 content descriptions into accessible content, such as content available over the Internet, to facilitate rapid and accurate content selection. The present invention satisfies those needs, as well as others, and overcomes the deficiencies of previously developed systems.